HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE

HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE

HUMANISTIC approach to personality

Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers

Abraham Maslow & Carl Rogers their theories

• emphasize human strengths & aspiration, conscious free will, and the fulfillment of human potential.

• present optimistic image of human nature and describe us as active, creative beings concerned with growth & self-actualization.

Maslow

• research on creative, independent, self-sufficient, fulfilled adults.

• people are born with set of instinctive needs that enable us to grow, develop, and fulfill our potential

The Hierarchy of Needs

• needs that activate and direct human behavior.

• physiological (lowest scale)

• safety

• belongingness and love,

• esteem,

• self-actualization (highest scale)

Lower needs must be at least partially satisfied before higher needs become influential.

Conditions for Achieving Self-Actualization

• We must be free of constraints imposed by society and by ourselves.

• We must not be distracted by the lower-order needs.

• We must be secure in our self-image and in our relationships with other people, and we must be able to love and be loved in return.

• We must have a realistic knowledge of our strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices.

Maslow called lower needs deficit, or deficiency, needs

failure to satisfy them produces a deficit or lack in the individual.

Physiological Needs

Basic survival (food, water, air, sleep)

Safety Needs

Feeling secure (shelter, job, health, stability).

Love & Belonging

Social connections (friends, family, relationships).

Esteem Needs

Feeling respected (self-confidence, achievements, recognition)

Self-Actualization

Personal growth (creativity, fulfilling potential, meaning in life).

Short Example for Notes:

Anna was homeless and focused on finding food 🍞 (Physiological). Then, she got a job 💼 and an apartment 🏠 (Safety). Later, she made friends ❤ (Love & Belonging). After some time, she gained confidence through her work 🏆 (Esteem). Finally, she started a charity to help others 🌍 (Self-Actualization)

Key Exam Tip:

• Basic needs (1-2) = Survival.

• Psychological needs (3-4) = Social & Self-worth.

• Growth need (5) = Reaching full potential.

Metamotivation

• drive beyond basic needs, focusing on personal growth, self-fulfillment, and achieving one's highest potential.

• It is what motivates self-actualized people in Maslow's hierarchy of needs (beyond the basic and psychological levels).

Key Aspects of Metamotivation:

✅ Found in people who have already satisfied their basic needs (food, safety, love, esteem).
✅ Driven by growth, creativity, and purpose, not survival.
✅ Linked to self-actualization (e.g., personal development, helping others).
✅ Opposite of deficiency motivation (D-motivation), which focuses on lacking needs.
✅ Leads to peak experiences (moments of intense happiness and fulfillment).

Short Example for Notes: metamotivation

• "Marie has everything she needs—food, safety, love, and respect.

• Instead of focusing on money, she spends her time teaching poor children for free, feeling deeply fulfilled.

• This is metamotivation because she seeks growth and purpose, not just survival.

Metamotivation & D-Motivation

• Metamotivation = Growth & Fulfillment 🌱

• D-Motivation = Basic Needs & Deficiencies ❌

Carl Roger

• person-centered therapy = improved personality is centred within the person

• insisted current feelings and emotions have a greater impact on personality.

• personality was only understood by subjective experiences.

Roger term: “fully functioning person”

• actualize the self

• the inborn tendency to actualize, to develop our abilities and potentials to the fullest

Roger term: Self-insight

• ✅ Self-Insight = Awareness of one’s true thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
  ✅ Essential for personal growth and self-actualization.
  ✅ People with high self-insight understand their strengths, weaknesses, emotions, and motivations.
  ✅ Therapy Goal: Rogers believed that client-centered therapy helps people gain self-insight by reducing incongruence between their real self and ideal self.

Example of Rogers self-insight

"Emma used to believe she was always happy, but through therapy, she gained self-insight and realized she was actually suppressing sadness. This awareness helped her grow emotionally and become more authentic.

Actualizing Tendency CARL ROGER

• encompasses all of our physiological and psychological needs

• serves as motivation to maintain the organism, providing for sustenance and survival.

Organismic Valuing Process

• governing process throughout the life span

• Positive experiences = promote actualization & are evaluated as good and desirable; we assign them a positive value.

• Negative experiences = perceived as hindering actualization & are undesirable, earn a negative value.

self-concept CARL ROGER

• involves distinguishing what is directly & immediately a part of the self from the people, objects, and events that are external to the self.

• our image of what we are, what we should be, and what we would like to be

Positive Regard

• when self emerges infants develop a learned need

• includes acceptance, love, and approval from other people, most notably from the mother during infancy.

• crucial to personality development

• Freud´s version of superego

Unconditional positive regard

• Approval granted regardless of a person’s behavior.

• In Rogers’s person-centered therapy, the therapist offers the client unconditional positive regard.

Positive self-regard

The condition under which we grant ourselves acceptance and approval.

Conditions of Worth

• evolve from positive regard leading to positive self-regard.

Conditional positive regard

• when parents not always react depending on a child´s behaviour→ the child understand that sometimes they are prized, and sometimes they are not

incongruence ROGER

• a mismatch or inconsistency between a person’s self-concept and their actual experiences or behavior.

• is when your real self (how you truly feel or act) does not match your ideal self (how you think you should be), or when your self-image doesn’t align with reality.

• due to: We learn to evaluate experiences, and to accept or reject them in terms of whether they bring positive regard from others.

Characteristics of Fully Functioning Persons ROGER

• Awareness of all experience; open to positive as well as negative feelings

• Freshness of appreciation for all experiences

• Trust in one’s own behavior and feelings

• Freedom of choice, without inhibitions

• Creativity and spontaneity

• Continual need to grow, to strive to maximize one’s potential in a state of actualizing